Vehicles, particularly commercial vehicles such as trucks, buses, and the like, transport millions of tons of cargo and millions of passengers to a variety of destinations worldwide. While the overwhelming majority of these trips are uneventful, a significant number of these trips experiences a problem due to a failure of a component of the vehicle itself. Such a problem can cause a delay and/or an accident, the latter of which may result in damage to the vehicle, its cargo, injured individual(s), loss of life, and/or the like.
To limit the unanticipated failure of a vehicle component, most vehicles, and all commercial vehicles, are generally required to undergo regular inspections. Further, additional inspections, particularly of commercial vehicles, often are carried out at random times and/or locations by members of state and/or federal enforcement organizations (e.g., state police, Department of Transportation, etc.). However, with a large number of vehicles involved in a random inspection, it is extremely difficult for an inspector to reliably select the vehicles most likely to experience a failure. Often, this is due to the limited resources and technologies available to the inspector and/or the implementation of the component. For example, electric and hydraulic brakes, unlike air brakes, cannot be readily visually evaluated by an inspector since they have no visible moving parts.
It is well known that brakes will heat up when used to slow a vehicle since the friction will dissipate the motion energy into heat. When a brake is not functioning properly, excessive or insufficient heat may be present in the braking area after the brakes have been used. Similarly, other components of a vehicle may show abnormal heat distribution as they approach failure. For example, improperly functioning bearings may result in increased friction, and therefore heat, between a wheel and an axle. Additionally, a failing tire may have increased heat in an area due to increased flexing and friction. A heat differential also can indicate other significant phenomena, such as leakage of cargo (e.g., from a tanker), leakage of exhaust, and/or the like.
Some inspection approaches use heat to determine if a vehicle brake component must be directly tested. For example, an inspector may place his/her hand near a vehicle's hydraulic or electric brake area to determine if it appears abnormally warmer than the surrounding air. However, this approach has a number of drawbacks including variations in inspectors and environmental conditions, variations in the amount of braking used (e.g., loaded versus unloaded truck), slow and invasive examination, which requires the truck to be stopped, and the like. Additionally, another approach uses thermal, or infrared, imaging to detect a defect in a vehicle brake component. In this approach, a human user evaluates a thermal image as a vehicle passes an imaging system set up adjacent to a road. However, this approach is limited in that, among other things, it requires a specially trained individual to evaluate the thermal images and/or operate the system, only a single side of the vehicle is imaged, it fails to address communications with an inspection site and/or logging data, and the like.